Sadly they are available at the price that they may be had more or less directly because they live extremely awful lives (although short ones compared to laying hens--apparently only 6-8 weeks). Pretty upsetting!! Basically turns me off them entirely. Fortunately the Impossible chicken nuggets/tenders are honestly really good imo, better than the burger/ground beef product line, so I eat a lot of those
It's not even wrong to eat humans. You can't just ignore the harm principle and remain ethical. Anything which is not harmful is permitted, and life does not have inherent value; neither does death inherently equate to harm.
Yes, I agree, it can be fine to eat humans, for example if they died of some reason other than being killed for the explicit purpose of being eaten. However, killing, i.e. nonconsensually depriving of life, DOES constitute harm. "I would like to eat this sentient creature" does not justify nonconsensually depriving it of life; neither does "I provided this sentient creature with a comfortable life until now," etc.
To clarify: life doesn't necessarily inherently have value. Which is why I said "sentient creatures" and not "anything alive." Similarly, while the lives of sentient creatures do not in 100% of cases have positive value, these are edge cases. I grant that if you find a deer by the side of the road, in terrible pain, certain to die, and slit its throat, it is equally permissible to eat it as if you had found it already dead. It is not, however, permissible to kill and eat a healthy deer, just because you presuppose that if you don't kill it will eventually die a painful death of starvation--for the same reason that it is impermissible to kill and eat me just because you presuppose that I will otherwise eventually die a painful death in a hospital cancer ward.
Sentient creatures, even assuming they have a good life, don't necessarily have concerns about the future to be interrupted, in which case it's not harm to kill them ( painlessly ). While others who care about them may suffer, not inherently more or less than if they had died in any other way, so that's a moot point. Humans have plans to be interrupted, so that's a different category of harm.
I disagree that the value of a life is in the future plans it makes. It is wrong to kill an unattended human baby who has no future plans and no ability to make such plans, or a person with a cognitive disability that impacts planning function. If I had to pick any specific thing that made sentient life valuable it would be "positively valenced experience".
Nevertheless, we do not at present inflict death painlessly on the sentient creatures we kill in order to eat them, so even if I agreed with you on this point, it would not impact my views on the moral correctness of veganism.
This objection has been explicitly addressed. Human beings are meaningfully different from other animals. This is why we live in polite society, shit in toilets, and develop shared ideas of law and morality, while other animals do not do that. If you think you're no better than a chimpanzee, though, I suppose I won't dissuade you.
I may have missed it, sorry. Species vary, check. Therefore, it is wrong to eat fish? Parenthetically, there are tens of thousands of predator species, why are the lions always the bad guys?
I am better than a chimp, that's why I'm entitled to do anything a chimp is entitled to do, including kill other animals. Moral status is ultimately dependent on behavioral reciprocity, e.g. I don't kill you because I don't want you to kill me, or I help you because I expect that you would help me in similar circumstances. Animals are incapable of engaging in that ergo they have no moral status.
Are you also better than a newborn baby? What about a severely cognitively disabled person? Neither of those category of person are capable of engaging in moral reasoning or behavioral reciprocity, so you are entitled to kill either, yes?
If any particular defenseless human is treated badly then other humans, whose interests are aligned with them (either via genetic relationship or through the possibility of becoming them, e.g. I too will be old and decrepit some day so it's in my interest to make sure old and decrepit people are treated fairly), will cause trouble. If I kill a baby then that baby's parents will kill me. If they kill me then my brother will kill them. Morality exists in part to prevent that maladaptive cycle of vengeance, and society encodes it into law because it wants its members plowing the field instead of fighting.
Morality exists because it's selfishly adaptive. That's the only reason ANY trait evolves - evolutionary game theory shows that it's literally impossible for it to be otherwise. If you start killing people then bad things will happen both to you and to your society. If you start killing animals then NOTHING BAD HAPPENS TO YOU. I know that because we've been doing it literally forever and we're doing just fine. There is zero correlation between "cultures that treat animals well" and "cultures that are successful". If anything, it's negative. India worships cows and is a shithole. We farm them like bacteria and are the richest culture in history.
Morality isn't some made up fairy tale that exists to make you feel better, sugar tits. It's a behavioral tendency that evolved to help you survive. If it doesn't help you survive (in a statistical expected-value sense) then it's not moral. Animals have no moral status because they're incapable, as a class, of engaging in reciprocal behavior. If cows were aware enough to avenge their brethren then maybe we'd be forced to recognize their moral status. Until that happens, however, that status doesn't exist.
It may be better to live a long comfortable life than a short comfortable life, but I’m pretty sure the counterfactual stop eating farmed meat is not that the farms continue to breed and care for the animals until they die a natural death, but rather they breed less animals and so less lives are lived.
The lives lived on factory farms are extremely horrible and almost certainly net negative, I greatly desire for the lives lived on factory farms to not be lived anymore. I didn't talk about it much on this post because it's imo hilariously overdetermined and why "reducing the number of extremely horrible lives lived on my dime" IS morally urgent enough for me to go to the trouble of changing my diet. It's wrong to kill sentient creatures just because you want to eat them and it's much wronger than that to bring sentient creatures into existence to torture them for a few years just because you want to eat them.
I like this because it is thought-provoking, but I dislike that the thoughts it provokes involve not eating tasty chickens.
Sadly they are available at the price that they may be had more or less directly because they live extremely awful lives (although short ones compared to laying hens--apparently only 6-8 weeks). Pretty upsetting!! Basically turns me off them entirely. Fortunately the Impossible chicken nuggets/tenders are honestly really good imo, better than the burger/ground beef product line, so I eat a lot of those
It's not even wrong to eat humans. You can't just ignore the harm principle and remain ethical. Anything which is not harmful is permitted, and life does not have inherent value; neither does death inherently equate to harm.
Yes, I agree, it can be fine to eat humans, for example if they died of some reason other than being killed for the explicit purpose of being eaten. However, killing, i.e. nonconsensually depriving of life, DOES constitute harm. "I would like to eat this sentient creature" does not justify nonconsensually depriving it of life; neither does "I provided this sentient creature with a comfortable life until now," etc.
To clarify: life doesn't necessarily inherently have value. Which is why I said "sentient creatures" and not "anything alive." Similarly, while the lives of sentient creatures do not in 100% of cases have positive value, these are edge cases. I grant that if you find a deer by the side of the road, in terrible pain, certain to die, and slit its throat, it is equally permissible to eat it as if you had found it already dead. It is not, however, permissible to kill and eat a healthy deer, just because you presuppose that if you don't kill it will eventually die a painful death of starvation--for the same reason that it is impermissible to kill and eat me just because you presuppose that I will otherwise eventually die a painful death in a hospital cancer ward.
Sentient creatures, even assuming they have a good life, don't necessarily have concerns about the future to be interrupted, in which case it's not harm to kill them ( painlessly ). While others who care about them may suffer, not inherently more or less than if they had died in any other way, so that's a moot point. Humans have plans to be interrupted, so that's a different category of harm.
I disagree that the value of a life is in the future plans it makes. It is wrong to kill an unattended human baby who has no future plans and no ability to make such plans, or a person with a cognitive disability that impacts planning function. If I had to pick any specific thing that made sentient life valuable it would be "positively valenced experience".
Nevertheless, we do not at present inflict death painlessly on the sentient creatures we kill in order to eat them, so even if I agreed with you on this point, it would not impact my views on the moral correctness of veganism.
It’s really not. Animals do it all the time. Why should we treat them better than they treat themselves?
This objection has been explicitly addressed. Human beings are meaningfully different from other animals. This is why we live in polite society, shit in toilets, and develop shared ideas of law and morality, while other animals do not do that. If you think you're no better than a chimpanzee, though, I suppose I won't dissuade you.
I may have missed it, sorry. Species vary, check. Therefore, it is wrong to eat fish? Parenthetically, there are tens of thousands of predator species, why are the lions always the bad guys?
I am better than a chimp, that's why I'm entitled to do anything a chimp is entitled to do, including kill other animals. Moral status is ultimately dependent on behavioral reciprocity, e.g. I don't kill you because I don't want you to kill me, or I help you because I expect that you would help me in similar circumstances. Animals are incapable of engaging in that ergo they have no moral status.
Are you also better than a newborn baby? What about a severely cognitively disabled person? Neither of those category of person are capable of engaging in moral reasoning or behavioral reciprocity, so you are entitled to kill either, yes?
If any particular defenseless human is treated badly then other humans, whose interests are aligned with them (either via genetic relationship or through the possibility of becoming them, e.g. I too will be old and decrepit some day so it's in my interest to make sure old and decrepit people are treated fairly), will cause trouble. If I kill a baby then that baby's parents will kill me. If they kill me then my brother will kill them. Morality exists in part to prevent that maladaptive cycle of vengeance, and society encodes it into law because it wants its members plowing the field instead of fighting.
Morality exists because it's selfishly adaptive. That's the only reason ANY trait evolves - evolutionary game theory shows that it's literally impossible for it to be otherwise. If you start killing people then bad things will happen both to you and to your society. If you start killing animals then NOTHING BAD HAPPENS TO YOU. I know that because we've been doing it literally forever and we're doing just fine. There is zero correlation between "cultures that treat animals well" and "cultures that are successful". If anything, it's negative. India worships cows and is a shithole. We farm them like bacteria and are the richest culture in history.
Morality isn't some made up fairy tale that exists to make you feel better, sugar tits. It's a behavioral tendency that evolved to help you survive. If it doesn't help you survive (in a statistical expected-value sense) then it's not moral. Animals have no moral status because they're incapable, as a class, of engaging in reciprocal behavior. If cows were aware enough to avenge their brethren then maybe we'd be forced to recognize their moral status. Until that happens, however, that status doesn't exist.
It may be better to live a long comfortable life than a short comfortable life, but I’m pretty sure the counterfactual stop eating farmed meat is not that the farms continue to breed and care for the animals until they die a natural death, but rather they breed less animals and so less lives are lived.
The lives lived on factory farms are extremely horrible and almost certainly net negative, I greatly desire for the lives lived on factory farms to not be lived anymore. I didn't talk about it much on this post because it's imo hilariously overdetermined and why "reducing the number of extremely horrible lives lived on my dime" IS morally urgent enough for me to go to the trouble of changing my diet. It's wrong to kill sentient creatures just because you want to eat them and it's much wronger than that to bring sentient creatures into existence to torture them for a few years just because you want to eat them.